1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an information providing apparatus for providing information via a network, and to a terminal apparatus for acquiring information via a network. Moreover, the present invention relates to an information providing system comprising apparatuses described above, and terminal apparatus, and to an information providing method.
2. Description of the Related Art
Conventionally, it is general that the following method is employed to acquire contents such as sound, photo, image and video from a server via network. According to the method, a terminal apparatus acquires a provide-able content list, and thereafter, searches a desired content from the content list. If the desired content is found, the terminal apparatus specifies the content to acquire the target content.
However, the foregoing method has the following problem. If a great many of provide-able contents is given, much time and labor are taken to search the target content from the content list. For this reason, the following method of searching the target content is proposed. According to the method, keyword such as work name, producer name, produced date is given to the content. The given keyword is specified to search a desired content.
Moreover, the content searching system is proposed (see JPN. PAT. APPLN. KOKAI Publication No. 2003-16085). The system provides keywords classified based on category hierarchy to a user terminal. Keyword setting is simplified using the classification to search a desired content.
On the other hand, user must make management of contents acquired via the network and contents produced by self. If the number of contents increases, much time and labor are taken to search a desired content as described above. In also case, the method of giving keywords to the desired content is proposed.